Comments on: Epic Moment: Free and fast graphics at last

By: launchpad.net/~roshan-geo…

launchpad.net/~roshan-geo… — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:23:08 +0000

Hey, Sebas,

The other day I decided to try out the LiveCD version of Ubuntu 10.04. Normally, I install to try Ubuntu out because proprietary drivers don’t work until you restart (meaningless on a LiveCD) but this time I had smooth desktop effects out of the box using my ATI 4670. This is enough for my next few graphics cards to be ATI cards.

Who are the people in charge of doing the drivers for the ATI cards (radeon, radeonhd)? They are awesome and should know that.

By: Rubén Rodríguez

Rubén Rodríguez — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:22:20 +0000

Too bad the Radeon driver isn’t fully free, it contains a binary blob. If you remove it you will lose your 3D and even 2D acceleration.

By: sebas

sebas — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:29:29 +0000

Cool.

We’re working hard to make it even better. :-)

By: sebas

sebas — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:29:00 +0000

As I mentioned, my gaming is negligible. I’d much much prefer speedy and smooth desktop effects, as I will likely never notice any advantages in DirectX Rendering speed. My use-case simply doesn’t cover this, and that’s fine.

Not having acceptable performance for even desktop usage is a showstopper though. My gut feeling is that a large percentage does not care about most of the games that really need today’s fastest graphics card.

As to Phoronix, given their track-record of low quality reviews and conclusions they’re drawing from their benchmarks, I wouldn’t be too worried about their results.

By: jscurtu

jscurtu — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:29:48 +0000

Hey Sebas,

same story here :-) I installed openSuse 11.3 starting with M7,… Have a HD3650 and I must say for now I am sticking with openSUSE and there very good and polished KDE desktop :-)

JAson

By: Arup

Arup — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:00:08 +0000

A cheap $30 nvidia 8400 with excellent linux drivers would let me watch full screen HD movies via VDPAU enabled mplayer, sadly my costly dual GPU edition ATI 4850 doesn’t, also other issues galore even with latest Catalyst on Lucidx64 and Fedora 13 so I have shelved it for now till ATI learns some humility and brings true hardware acceleration which is easy to implement. I know there is VAAPI but it just doesn’t work on mplayer for now, either via RVM PPA or compiling the latest.

By: casey

casey — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 23:54:12 +0000

In best “Hurly from Lost” voice: Yeah, whatever dude.

All that’s fine and nifty for basic desktop stuff, but if you game AT ALL, the open sauce stuff just doesn’t cut it. FPS is life, and the closed source drivers currently are the ONLY way to go for those of us who do more than look at code or spreadsheets.

Also, hate nvidia all ya want, but their closed drivers + gtx2xx cards are FAST, especially for opengl and dx via wine. Phoronix recently benched the closed vs. open drivers for both nvidia and ATI, and its not even close at this point.

By: Luca Beltrame

Luca Beltrame — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:26:04 +0000

Bah… spoke too soon. KMS loads but 3D gets disabled with a cryptic error (tested RC1 on x86-64). I opened a bug, I hope it’s not my hardware’s fault…

By: lefty.crupps

lefty.crupps — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:38:04 +0000

I too bought an ATi 3450 card for home to support the openness of ATi after tiring of the nVidia driver reinstallations all the time. The closed ATi drivers are a headache to install in Debian Sid so I just waited until the FLOSS drivers could do the job, and they did! Since then, for my company, I try very hard to only buy the ATi cards when needed, since we do have people that run FLOSS desktops and I want it to work great for them as well. KDE 4.x on the ATi 3450 is a very nice experience.

That said, I do wish that XOrg could run without an xorg.conf file (on my Debian system, it’s needed to specify the driver and some other options), and that I could do dual-screens without having to define in that file that my possible desktop could go up to 100,000 x 100,000 pixels (ok its not set that high, but until I put that code in I couldn’t do the dual screens due to lack of virtual space or something).

You can buy ATi 3450 cards (different brand tho) at NewEgg for $30, or even $20 with a rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131119

By: IAnjo

IAnjo — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:45:48 +0000

I have a X1300 with open drivers also and dual head. Also works very nicely :) Here's my xorg.conf to make the Xserver start up right away with the two monitors in KDM:


Section "Device"
    Identifier	"Radeon X1300"
    Driver	"radeon"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier	"DVI-0"
    Option	"Position" "1280 0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier	"VGA-0"
    Option	"Position" "0 0"
    Option "Primary" "true"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier	"Default Screen"
    Monitor	"DVI-0"
    Monitor	"VGA-0"
    Device	"Radeon X1300"
EndSection

Hope this helps :) Go free drivers!